About Domain Names

There are 3 distinct parts to registration and management of your domain name.

If you transfer your domain name to Millstream, we will look after Registration, DNS Hosting and Hosting of your website. We may also setup and manage your email services through Google Apps if required.

1. Registration

Registration is the reservation of a domain name for your usage.

A registrar is a company that is authorised by the authority of the top level domain (.com, .au, .uk etc) to register domain names on your behalf.

For example, the Australian government organisation 'AuDA' is the official authority for all domains with a .au extension.

AuDA has authorised several large companies ('registrars') - such as Melbourne IT, or TPP - to register domain names to individuals or companies.

Millstream (and many other companies) utilise these registrars to register the domain on your behalf. Millstream use TPP Wholesale and AWS for the majority of domains.

Once a domain is registered, Millstream update the records at the registrar to point to our DNS Hosting Servers.

2. DNS Hosting (Domain Name System Hosting)

When someone tries to utilise your domain name (by entering it in a web browser or sending you an email), the DNS Servers are contacted to find out the location of your web server or mail server to send the request to.

The DNS Parking does not include the hosting of your website or email - the DNS Hosting is simply the address book which allows those other services to be found. These additional services may also be hosted by Millstream or they may be hosted be different companies.

For each domain name, Millstream will record and manage multiple records, sometimes including location of the web server, multiple mail servers, intranet servers, ftp servers etc.

If the DNS Servers are not setup correctly, or not working correctly people will get an error when trying to visit your website or send you an email.

Millstream use 4 DNS Servers located around the world simultaneously for each domain name. This ensures that in the event of failure of up to 3 servers, your domain name will continue to work.

3. Hosting

Hosting may include hosting of your Millstream CMS website or the hosting of your email mailboxes.

Millstream only provide hosting for Millstream CMS sites, but we can organise and setup a Google Apps account to host your email mailboxes if we also manage your domain name.

If you host your own mail server or any other service, we can configure the DNS Hosting to point to those services for you.

When transferring a domain name to Millstream, you need to establish whether you need a Google Apps account setup to host your email, or whether you will continue to keep your email with another provider or your own server.